The Hourglass Mystery
by mazebuilder24
Summary: An eerie warning from an unlikely source draws Nancy into a web of secrets, obsession, and madness and forces her to confront her own demons...
1. A Father's Warning

**I don't own Nancy Drew or her family, or the lyrics to the Jim Croce song "Time in A Bottle." It's a good song, though. If you haven't heard it, check it out sometime.**

"I can't help but think that it all _means _something, Nancy," said Celia Laramie helplessly, clutching at her friend's arm. "If anyone can help me, it's you. Please, say you'll come to Selkirk End with me."

Nancy glanced down at her gloved hands, stung by the desperation in Celia's grey eyes. "You know I'd like to, Celie," she said slowly, "but Dad needs me right now, and I can't leave him alone. Maybe Bess or George—"

"I don't need Bess and George!" Celia cried with a sudden ferocity, crumpling her tear-dampened handkerchief into her palm. "I need someone who can solve this mystery once and for all. My brother is dead, Nancy. And I'm utterly alone."

Nancy Drew was silent for a moment, lost in thought. Her plain but elegant grey wool suit set off her classically lovely features and red-gold hair. Her former classmate Celia Laramie was dressed in a conservative black dress and her chestnut locks were pulled up into a severe bun, but nothing could disguise the delicacy of her aristocratic features and slender figure. Had the two girls not been at a burial, they would have drawn many admiring glances.

Finally, Nancy looked up into her friend's eyes, which glittered with unshed tears. "Come home with me," she said impulsively. "I'm afraid it won't be very cheerful, with Dad still recovering, but at least you won't be alone."

Celia burst into tears, burying her face in her hands. Nancy put a reassuring arm around her shoulders, drawing the sobbing girl close. "It'll be all right," she whispered. Over Celia's shoulder, Nancy watched the minister climb into his black car and drive away. The cemetery workmen were preparing to fill in the grave. She had to get Celia away from this place before the earth swallowed her brother forever.

"Come on," she said, gently nudging her friend upright. "Let's get out of this cold." As if on Nancy's bidding, a chill wind arose, sending the dead leaves skittering around them and tugging at a few strands of hair that had escaped from Celia's chignon. Celia sniffed once and wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

"I'm sorry," she said. "Of course I'll come home with you. I don't—I don't want to go back to Selkirk End tonight."

Ten minutes later, the girls were being bundled into the house by a severe-looking Hannah Gruen. Hannah had cared for Nancy since her mother had died fifteen years before, and Nancy silently wished that Celia had someone to care for her.

"Come in, come in," Hannah urged, shutting the door behind them. "Only the end of October, and it's like winter already. It's a wonder you girls aren't froze solid."

She took the girls' coats and bustled them into the kitchen, where they were instantly enveloped in the warm smell of cinnamon.

"The pie'll be done in a few minutes," Hannah said. "Until then, here's some hot chocolate." She shoved two steaming mugs in front of them and then paused, hands on her ample hips.

"I wanted to go, dear," she said to Celia, who was blowing on her hot chocolate. "But with Carson the way he is, I just couldn't get away. But I remember Ethan coming to pick you up after playdates with Nancy. Very polite. A very nice boy."

"It's all right, Mrs. Gruen," Celia said. "I know you and Mr. Drew would have liked to be there."

"How's he doing th'safternoon, Hannah?" Nancy asked quietly.

"He's in the living room," the matronly housekeeper replied. "You two can go talk to him yourself."

They left the table and their half-finished mugs of cocoa and slipped into the darkened living room. The only light came from the sickly blue glow of the television set. Onscreen, Lawrence Welk sang a duet with a blonde woman dressed in a frilly pink blouse and skirt. The orchestra played a short interlude, and Lawrence twirled the woman around in a cloud of pink lace.

In a recliner on the opposite end of the room hunched a man, ghastly pale in the flickering light. He was covered with an orange afghan, and his almost-skeletal hand rested on the arm of the chair. Even in the dark, there was an evident pallor to his once-handsome face and his dark hair was flecked with grey.

"Hello, Dad," Nancy said gently.

Carson Drew smiled, and in his smile one could detect traces of the man he once had been: respected criminal lawyer, pillar of River Heights society, dashing and laughing and vibrant.

"Hello, Nancy," Carson said, "and hello, Celia. I'm sorry I couldn't make it th'safternoon—"

"That's all right," Celia said again. "I just wanted to thank you for everything you did for Ethan and me."

"That's my job," Carson said brightly, "or, it once was."

"And it will be again," Nancy added, twisting her gloves in her hands. "You look much better today."

"I feel better," Carson admitted. There was an awkward pause, broken only by the reedy baritone of Lawrence Welk.

"I hope you don't mind my staying here tonight," Celia said quietly. The leaping, flame-like glow from the television set caught in the hollows under her cheekbones, making her eyes seem large and childlike.

"Not at all," said Carson warmly. "In fact, I was thinking of having Nancy go home with you for a while, just until you get settled in."

"Dad," Nancy interrupted, "I can't leave you here—"

"What, you think Hannah is an axe murderer?" Carson quipped. "Celia, would you like for Nancy to stay at Selkirk End for a little while?"

"Oh, please, Mr. Drew, could she?" Celia gasped. She turned pleadingly to her friend. "Nancy, would you?"

Nancy sighed, looking from the wasted face of her father to the desperate eyes of her grieving friend. "All right," she said finally. "We'll go tomorrow, Celie, if you'd like."

"I would," Celia said fervently.

Hannah poked her head into the living room. "Pie's done," she announced cheerfully. "Get it while it's hot."

"Better get in there," Carson said. "It smells wonderful."

"Want me to bring you some, Dad?" Nancy asked.

"No, dear, that's fine," her father said. Nancy saw him glance toward Celia, an odd, rapt expression on his face.

Around Celia's neck hung an oval-shaped silver locket, and the reflection of the television was like turquoise fire on its shimmering surface. Celia, noticing his gaze, stepped forward and opened it to reveal two tiny photographs inside.

"It's my brother and me," she said simply, showing them to Nancy and her father. On the left was a photo of Celia, taken when she had been slightly younger, Nancy thought. She was smiling at the camera, but she had blinked at the instant the photo had been taken; her downcast gaze made her seem demure and sad. On the right was her brother, Ethan. The photo was slightly blurred, and a heavy shadow was on the subject's face, but his dark hair and sheepish smile were still evident. He seemed far away from the viewer, as if he were already receding into a great distance.

"I can't believe he's gone," Celia murmured.

"It's a beautiful thing to remember him with," Carson said softly.

"It was a Christmas present from my parents when I was nine," Celia replied, closing the locket with a decisive snap. "Not six months later, they went sailing on the lake and never came back. From then on, it was only Ethan and me."

"What does the symbol on the front mean?" Nancy asked, anxious to distract her friend from her gloomy memories.

"The hourglass in the flames? I don't know exactly. My mom told me once that it was an heirloom from her family, the Selkirks. Now I'll never find out, I guess."

"Pie," said Hannah again, and the girls jumped.

"Go on, get your pie!" Carson said, smiling. "Pie waits for no man. Or girl."

"Oh Dad," Nancy said, glad that he was joking again, even if the jokes were bad ones. "Come on then, Celie. Dad, are you sure you don't want—Dad! Dad!"

She rushed to his side in alarm. Carson Drew was staring at the television set, but his eyes were glassy and unfocused.

"Beware the shattered mirror," he whispered hoarsely.


	2. A Missing Manuscript

"Dad!" Nancy shouted, shaking him. "Dad! What do you mean?" Behind them, she could hear Hannah's rapid footsteps. Suddenly, Carson blinked and turned to face his daughter.

"What is it, Nancy?" he asked, a puzzled expression on his face. "I'm fine."

"No, you weren't," Nancy said firmly. "You got this vacant expression on your face, and you said 'Beware the shattered mirror.' What did you mean?"

"I can't recall saying that," Carson said peevishly. "Please, go eat your pie. And leave me alone, Hannah." Hannah drew back as if stung; she had been rearranging the afghan around his knees.

"Well, don't blame me if you catch a cold in this drafty house," she muttered, and disappeared into the kitchen. After a few uncertain moments, the girls followed, leaving Carson alone with the singing mermaid on television.

The rest of the evening passed uneventfully, though Nancy tossed and turned all night, her mind clouded with fear. What if her father worsened while she was away? Despite his protests, the incident earlier in the afternoon proved that he was still feeble. And what did he mean, 'Beware the shattered mirror?' Was it merely the rambling of a very ill man, or had the episode been brought on by some distress—perhaps the sight of Celia's locket?

And, even more vexingly, what mystery had Celia been referring to in the cemetery? She had never mentioned it before, although Nancy had to admit that she and Celia had drifted apart since their days at River Heights High School. She smiled a little bit as she watched Celia sleep on the foldaway bed. The loosened hair that had fallen onto her face fluttered with each breath. Nancy was reminded of sleepovers in happier days, with late nights of giggling and secrets and Hannah's pancakes the next morning…

And her father presiding over the breakfast table, making jokes from behind his copy of the River Heights Clarion, strong and handsome and funny. At nine o' clock on the dot, Ethan Laramie would knock on the door and Hannah would let him in. He would sit beside his sister at the table, refusing Hannah's offers of bacon and juice, and respond seriously to Carson's inquiries about his yet-unfinished novel.

"Oh, it's almost done," he would say, waving his hand. "You know how these things are, always revising. But soon I'll send it off to my publisher. He's getting anxious. Worried I'll never get it done. 'Laramie,' he says, 'people are going to forget who you are if you don't finish a second book soon.' But he worries too much. No thanks, Mrs. Gruen, I've already eaten."

As Hannah would slink away, looking resentful at having her cooking refused, Celia would pipe up, through a mouthful of pancake, "And when the book is done, we'll be rich, right?"

"Sure will," Ethan would say, smiling across the table at his much-younger sister. "And we'll leave Selkirk End and see the world…"

The clock striking two downstairs jolted Nancy from her reverie. I'll think about this tomorrow, she decided, as sleep washed over her.

The next morning, Hannah saw the girls off; they had said their goodbyes to Carson earlier, over breakfast.

"Are you sure you've got enough food with you?" she demanded. "It's a long drive."

"I'm sure," Nancy said through gritted teeth. She knew that cooking was Hannah's way of showing love, but having food forced upon her constantly was somewhat tiring. She climbed into the driver's seat of her powder-blue Mustang convertible. The top was up, offering what protection it could against the biting October wind. "Ready to go, Celie?"

Celia nodded, biting her lip. Her small traveling bag was on her lap, and she hugged it close. As Nancy pulled out of the driveway, waving to Hannah, she wondered if she should have asked if Bess and George could come. As much as she liked Celia, she felt that they had little in common now that they had left high school.

Bess would love Selkirk End, Nancy thought, remembering the few times she had seen it herself. It's just the sort of romantic, silly, spooky thing that she likes. Bess Marvin, plump, blond, and flirtatious, was one of Nancy's best friends. Her cousin George Fayne was her polar opposite: boyish, brunette, and practical. Both of them were as dear to Nancy as sisters, and she regretted not telephoning them that morning to say goodbye.

The drive was somewhat uncomfortable for Nancy. Celia was silent, and occasionally Nancy would flick a glance her way and spot a single crystalline tear shimmering on her pale cheek. A few miles out of River Heights, she turned on the radio, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel. Soon she was lost in thought, but she was jerked abruptly back to reality when Celia turned off the radio.

"I'm sorry," she said, responding to Nancy's look of surprise. "I just can't stand to hear that song."

Jim Croce had been singing "Time in a Bottle," which Nancy had to admit was not the most cheerful song in the world.

"That's all right," she said. "Aren't we nearly there? Is this where I turn?"

"Yes," Celia said, and fingered her locket nervously as they bumped down the lane, past the sentinels of oak trees, their branches newly bare. They reminded Nancy of a row of skeletal hands thrusting up from the earth, and she gave an involuntary shiver.

Finally they pulled up in front of the house, and Celia leapt out of the car almost at once. Nancy followed more slowly, taking it all in.

Selkirk End was a huge, senselessly sprawling folly of a Victorian mansion; it appeared to have been designed by a madman. Silly little turrets and towers and oddly-angled rooms jutted out at all angles, and on the very top was an octagonal room with a domed roof that ended in a single lightning rod. The house had clearly seen better days; the wrap-around porch drooped sadly, and the whole structure seemed to be sinking toward the earth in exhaustion.

Nancy followed Celia up the steps onto the porch, gingerly stepping around the stray cats that littered it, snoozing, curled up against the cold. A rickety porch swing rocked back and forth eerily, as if its occupants had just left it. After unlocking the imposing front door, Celia stepped inside and Nancy followed. It was quite dark in the hall, and the sound of the door closing behind them echoed emptily above. There was the flick of a light switch, and Nancy could see Celia disappearing into a room to their left.

"I have to check something," she called. "Just a moment."

Nancy took in her surroundings, from the threadbare Persian rug under her feet to the stack of ancient phone books on the entry table to the dozens of pairs of shoes, some obviously long-abandoned, piled in the corner. Suddenly she heard Celia give a little shriek. The girl rushed back into the hall, her eyes wide with fright.

"Nancy," she gasped, her long white fingers tangled in the chain of her locket, "Nancy, my brother's manuscript is gone!"


	3. A Million Shards of Glass

"Gone?" Nancy asked blankly, following her friend into the study. "What do you mean, 'gone?'"

"I mean," snapped Celia, "that he always kept it in the roll top desk, and he laid it there before he died, and that it is now missing."

Nancy walked over to the desk and put her hand on its surface. She noted with surprise that it was not facing the wall, as one might expect, but rather towards the open door into the hall. There was nothing on the desktop except an ink-stained calendar from July 1963, a mug full of dulled pencils, a pocket watch stopped at half-past three and a pair of safety scissors.

"Was the desk closed and locked?" she inquired, turning to face Celia again.

"It was never locked," she replied, pinching the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger. "I don't even know that there is a key."

Nancy sighed and sank onto a low ottoman in the center of the cavernous room. Wan sunlight, starred with a million motes of dust, streamed through a row of tall, east-facing windows. On all four walls, bookshelves towered toward the ceiling, with ladders to allow access to the top shelves. Besides the desk, there was a massive pie safe on the far wall, a few faded wing chairs and a large library table in the center of the room. A framed drawing on the wall next to the pie safe caught Nancy's attention, and she rose to examine it.

"That's always been here," Celia said, joining her in front of it. It was a pen-and-ink map of the grounds of Selkirk End, showing the house and the gardens behind, and beyond them, Lake Augusta, fringed by woods.

Beside the map hung a portrait of a dour old man with a walrus moustache. He was frowning, and his beady black eyes flashed a warning to the viewer.

"That's Jonas Selkirk, my mother's great-great-grandfather," Celia said. "He built the house over a hundred years ago. Everyone always said he hid a treasure here, in a secret passage or something. Ethan and I always used to look for it when we were little, but we never found anything."

"I see," Nancy said thoughtfully.

"Can you help me find the manuscript?" Celia demanded.

"I can try," Nancy replied. "But I do have another question." She turned to face Celia and put a hand on the girl's elbow. "Celie, back in the cemetery, yesterday, you said that there was a mystery surrounding Selkirk End. What were you referring to?"

Celia slowly crossed the room, leaving Nancy standing alone next to the pie safe.

"No mystery, really," she said. "I mean, besides the old story about Jonas Selkirk's treasure. It's just that—"

"That what?" Nancy prompted.

"The night before he died," Celia said, gazing out the window onto the brown, weed-choked lawn below, "he called me in here. He was sitting at the desk, writing on his book, like he always did. He liked to write on yellow legal pads with a regular old Bic pen. He put it down when I came in. I sat in that chair, opposite the desk, and he looked at me very seriously."

"Did he seem troubled?" Nancy asked.

"No more so than usual," Celia replied slowly. "He was always sort of gloomy when he was writing. But that night, he asked if he could see my locket. I took it off and handed to him. He looked at the front for a moment and then opened it and turned around. I couldn't see what he was doing, and I asked what was wrong. He turned back and fastened it around my neck again.

'Just wanted to look at it,' he said.

I asked him why. He was evasive, and I let it drop. Then he sat down again and leaned forward, like he was going to whisper something to me.

'If anything happens to me,' he said, 'I want you to do something for me.'

I was scared, and I told him not to be stupid, that nothing was going to happen.

'Read my manuscript. You'll know what to do,' he said. 'Trust me.'

He said nothing else about it, and I went to bed. The next morning I found him—" Her voice broke, and Nancy felt a surge of pity for the abandoned girl.

"I-I found him lying on the floor by the desk. I called an ambulance. In the twenty minutes it took to arrive I knew that he was dead and had been for some hours. There was no blood, no sign of a struggle, nothing. The doctors said that he must have had an undiagnosed heart condition, that it had probably only been a matter of time."

"Do you believe that?" Nancy asked quietly.

"No," Celia admitted. "I stayed that night in River Heights, with an old friend of my mother's, an elderly lady. I was distraught and alone, and I forgot about what he'd told me about the manuscript. I only remembered this morning, in the car. When I heard that song."

"Why did it remind you?" Nancy asked, puzzled.

"I don't know," Celia said. "There was something about it, though…" she trailed off.

Nancy was intrigued, but privately doubted whether Celia was telling her the entire truth.

"There is one more thing," Celia added. "Last night, before bed, I looked at my locket again. I removed Ethan's picture, and I found this behind it." She opened the locket and pulled out a tiny gold key, no larger than a paper clip.

"Is it the key to the desk?" Nancy asked, examining it.

"I tried," Celia said. "But it doesn't fit. I've never seen it before in my life."

"So," Nancy mused, sitting down on the ottoman, "there are three mysteries here. The key, the missing manuscript and Ethan's death." She glanced up at her friend to see how she would react to Nancy's cold appraisal of the situation, but Celia betrayed no emotion. "Does anyone else have a key to the house?"

"No," Celia said. "The original locks were on the house for years, but they were getting rusty and my parents had them changed right before they died. We--I--have the only keys."

"Do you have any relatives nearby?" Nancy asked suddenly.

"None," Celia said.

"Friends? Neighbors?"

"No," the girl said, "Our nearest neighbors live on the other side of the lake, and we barely know them. Mrs. Hartford, the lady I stayed with after Ethan died, would call occasionally, but I wouldn't say we're close."

Nancy thought a moment, looking up at the untidy piles of books stacked on the shelves. "Why don't you show me around a little, Celia? That way I'll get my bearings."

"I'll show you to your room," Celia replied, and Nancy followed her into the foyer. As she did, she noticed something that had escaped her when they had first arrived. Hanging in the hall, opposite the study door, was an empty frame. On the hardwood floor beneath it lay hundreds of jagged shards of glass, glittering like new-fallen snow.

_Beware the shattered mirror!_


	4. A Cry From the Hall

"Was this mirror broken when you left?" Nancy demanded.

"I-I don't know," Celia said, her voice tinged with surprise. "I was so upset when we—when I—when the ambulance left, I didn't notice." She knelt to retrieve a heavy object lying on the floor amid the silvery debris.

"This was always on the desk," she said thoughtfully, turning a brass paperweight in the shape of an elephant over in her hands. "I didn't even notice it was missing."

"Someone threw this at the mirror," Nancy mused, looking back through the open door of the study. "He picked it up off the desk—and threw it—but why? Was there an intruder?"

Celia looked troubled. "I didn't hear anything that night," she said slowly, "but my room is upstairs. But wait—that morning, when I came downstairs—I only came this way because something caught my eye. Maybe I saw the glass glittering on the floor."

Nancy was silent, lost in thought. "Show me to my room," she said, picking up her suitcase. "And show me your room and Ethan's, too."

Nancy followed her friend up the winding spiral staircase. Celia led her down a narrow, dimly lit hall and opened a door at the end. Light poured from the open door and Nancy was beckoned inside.

The bedroom faced north, and through the large windows Nancy could see the overgrown walled garden and cracked patio sloping down toward the lake. On the far shore, the shimmering lake was fringed with woods.

"It's lovely," she murmured, turning to survey the room. It was ornate but shabby; the walls were papered in faded pink roses and the bedclothes were threadbare. A few brownish water stains marred the white ceiling and the wooden floor was nicked and scratched. There was a fireplace on the south wall. On the mantel was a vase of dead roses and baby's breath, and floor in front of it was littered with dried petals.

"Let me know if you need anything," said Celia nervously, twisting the front of her blouse in her hands. "We're—well, I'm—not used to having guests."

Nancy set her suitcase on the vanity stool and glanced in the large oval mirror. Her reflection was slightly warped, giving her a morose expression and lengthening her features like a Mannerist painting. On the vanity's dust-carpeted surface was a lady's hairbrush with a few blond strands caught in its bristles.

"It's fine, really," Nancy said reassuringly. "It reminds me of something from _Jane Eyre_."

"I always liked _Wuthering Heights _better," Celia said, gesturing toward the door. "Come on, I'll show you my room."

Celia's bedroom was right next door. It was similar to Nancy's, except that the dominant color scheme was a delicate lilac and the windows faced west. Nancy stooped to examine a silver-framed photograph on Celia's bedside table.

"Is this your parents?" she asked. A young couple sat on the porch swing Nancy had seen earlier, arms around each other, smiling into blinding sunlight. She could not make out their features.

"Yes, when they were quite young," Celia said, crossing the room to join her. "They met at college and lived out west for a time. That's where Ethan was born. They moved back here after my grandfather Selkirk, my mom's dad, died. And this is Ethan and me when we were little." She lifted the photo beside it to show Nancy.

Celia could not have been more than five, dressed in a frilly white pinafore, her dark hair in fussy pigtails, perched on a stool with her Mary Jane-clad feet dangling in front of her. Behind her stood a tall teenage boy with curly dark hair, a crooked smile on his face.

"Ethan was much older than you," Nancy commented, placing the photo back on the table.

"I think that's why we always got along so well," Celia said. "When our parents died, he was nineteen. He gave up school to come and live here with me." She sat down on the bed, gazing out the window. "He gave up so much for my sake. He always wanted to travel and write for magazines. But when _The Children and the Flowers _was so well-received, he decided to be a novelist."

Celia glanced up at Nancy, her long dark eyelashes frosted with tears. "I want to find out why he died, Nancy. It's all I can do for him now."

"Why don't you show me his room," Nancy said gently, helping Celia to her feet. "I'll do everything I can to help you, but first I need to know everything about your brother and this house."

Sniffling, Celia led the way down the hall and past the stair landing into the east wing. At the end of an identical hall she opened a door identical to Nancy's. But the room inside was completely different from those on the west except for the tall, north-facing windows.

The curtains and bed hangings were a dark green that seemed to swallow all the light from the room. The paneling too was dark, and the wallpaper was a mottled brownish color.

"We think this must have been the master bedroom at one time," Celia explained. "There's something rather Jonas-like about this room, don't you think?"

Remembering the portrait in the study, Nancy had to agree. There was little in the room that revealed Ethan Laramie's personality. There were a few piles of books and papers on the little writing desk in the corner, and a tan plaid dress shirt was tossed carelessly over the back of the chair. Nancy opened the wardrobe but found only T-shirts, jeans and a broken fishing rod.

She examined the framed photographs on his bedside table: what appeared to be his parents' wedding photo and beside it, Celia's senior portrait.

"Did he have any friends?" she asked his sister.

"Not since he left school, I don't think," Celia said.

"Well, that's about it—" Nancy suddenly fell silent and looked at Celia. "Celie," she hissed. "were you crying just now?"

"No," Celia said quietly, her voice taut. "Did you hear something?"

"Shhh!" Nancy ordered.

From somewhere in the hall came the sound of high, frantic sobs, like a woman in desperate grief. Quickly, Nancy crossed the room and peered out the door.

There was no one there!


	5. A Lady after Midnight

"You heard that too, right?" Nancy said to Celia as they stood, mystified, in the doorway.

"Yeah," Celia stammered. "Yeah, I heard that."

"Has it ever happened before?"

"Never, that I know of," Celia said nervously, sliding her locket back and forth on its chain. "Do you think there's someone in the house?"

"Maybe," Nancy said cautiously. She didn't believe in ghosts; long investigative experience had taught her that visitors from the "other world" usually had an ulterior motive. But if any house was haunted, she reflected, it would be this one.

She slipped into the hall, looking both ways, but saw nothing. There was no trace of the intruder on the stairs or in the foyer below.

"Nancy," Celia said from behind her. "it was probably only the wind howling through a crack somewhere. Let's go have some lunch."

Nancy was certain that what they had heard had not been the wind, but allowed Celia to lead her to the kitchen. The girls ate peanut butter sandwiches and Hannah's leftover egg salad, sitting silently at the massive oak dining table.

The dining room was cavernous and gloomy, with heavy red velvet curtains, choked with dust, at the large windows. A chandelier missing several of its crystal pendants hung over their heads, and a huge credenza loomed along the side wall. The only sound was the clink of forks on the girls' plates. The peanut butter seemed dryer than usual to Nancy, and it was an effort to swallow. She wondered if she should call to check on her father.

"We're cursed, you know," Celia said suddenly, setting her glass of milk on the table with a dull thud.

"Cursed?" Nancy repeated, looking up.

Celia leaned back in her chair and studied the tabletop self-consciously. "My parents died when they were still pretty young, and now Ethan's dead too. I never knew my mom's parents—they died before I was born, and she didn't have any living relatives except a sister who moved away before I was born. It must be a Selkirk curse."

"What about your father's family?" Nancy asked gently. "Did he have any relatives you might get in touch with?"

"I don't know," Celia said, a quirk of a smile touching her lips. "I remember he once said that his family probably didn't want to hear from him."

Nancy wasn't sure how to respond to this, so placed her fork gently on her empty plate and took a gulp of milk.

"I suppose I'll die young, too," Celia went on. She seemed to be talking to herself; she gazed off into middle distance and there was something trancelike about the way she spoke.

"Don't say that," Nancy protested.

"But it's true," Celia said, with a note of near-pride in her voice. "I mean, really, Nancy. I'm not any use to anyone."

"Why don't you show me the rest of the house?" Nancy asked quickly, rising and carrying her dishes back to the kitchen. Sighing, Celia followed, and to her immense relief she did not mention her impending death for the rest of the afternoon.

The girls spent the hours until dusk exploring every nook and cranny of the old house. Even Celia seemed to forget her troubles as they poked about with flashlights, jumping at every sound. They found a few items Celia had lost over the years, including a Barbie doll and a pink mitten, and discovered a nest of mice in an upstairs closet, but Nancy saw no evidence of the mysterious weeping woman or anything unusual that might give a clue to Ethan's death.

The house itself was a puzzle, its hallways twisting and turning back on themselves. Its design was haphazard; the only access to the conservatory on the east side was though the laundry room, and there was a small bathroom off the coat closet in the foyer, visible only if one swept the coats to one side and crawled past the piles of rubber boots and umbrellas on the floor.

That evening, the girls had supper in the dining room and then played cards in the formal parlor. Celia told Nancy that she and Ethan had never owned a television set, but that there was a very nice record player in the study. There was a radio in the corner of the parlor, hidden by a huge potted fern, and the girls listened to it as they played Old Maid, the only game to which they both remembered the rules.

As she climbed into bed that night, Nancy felt a stab of guilt at the thought of her father. I'll call him first thing tomorrow, she promised herself. She pulled the thin sheet over her shoulders and curled up, eyes closed.

She never knew how long she slept before she heard it. Footsteps, light and hesitant on the floor at the foot of her bed.

"Celia?" she whispered, sitting upright and brushing her hair from her eyes. "Celia, is that you?"

There was no answer, and Nancy could see no one in the room. Suddenly, she caught sight of a slender shadow crouched at the foot of the bed. With a cry, Nancy sprang from the bed and leapt at it.

Certain that Celia would hear and come running, Nancy pummeled the intruder with her fists, howling.

"Hey, get _off _me!" a high-pitched voice shrieked. "I ain't done nothin' to you, lady!"

Gasping for breath, Nancy scrabbled across the wooden floor and flicked on the light switch. At the foot of the bed hunched a weedy-looking young woman dressed all in black, except for a large, unbuttoned tan shirt that hung loosely from her lanky frame. Her straggly dirty-blonde hair drooped from a low ponytail. Nancy guessed that the stranger was a few years older than her and Celia.

"Hey," the woman said again. "Hey, now." Her knees were pulled up to her chin and her whole body was tensed, anticipating attack. There was something deer-like about her, skittish and long-limbed and wide-eyed.

"Who are you?" Nancy demanded, feeling less than threatening in her lacy blue nightgown. She seized the hairbrush off the vanity table and brandished it warningly.

The woman sneered and bit her lip, drumming her fingers percussively on the floor. She seemed to be in a state of constant nervous motion. "Why d'you wanna know?"

"That's not an answer," Nancy snapped, wondering where Celia was.

The woman made an impatient noise.

"I'm waiting," Nancy said, arms crossed in front of her.

The stranger sighed roughly, eyes downcast, and said, "Fine. My name's Isabel Ficklin. Happy?"

Nancy had never seen anyone who looked less like an Isabel. "What are you doing here?" she asked. "Was that you crying earlier?"

"I been here for years," Isabel said, climbing awkwardly to her feet and sitting on the blanket chest at the foot of the bed. There was a stack of yellow paper next to her, Nancy noticed for the first time.

"What's that?"

"I was bringin' you this," Isabel said sadly, holding it out to her. "I didn' want to give it up, it's all I have left of him, but I heard you talkin' to Celia downstairs and if it'll help—"

Nancy took the sheaf of paper and read the top page. It was criss-crossed with spindly, frantic handwriting; she picked out the words "curse" and "Selkirk."

"What is this?"

"It's his book," Isabel said, tugging at the front of her shirt. "The one he was always writin' on."

"This," Nancy demanded, gesturing at it, "this is Ethan Laramie's manuscript? Why do you have it? And, more importantly, who are you?"

"I told you," Isabel said patronizingly, as if she were dealing with a small child, "I'm Isabel Ficklin. And that's all I have left of him."

Nancy had lost all patience. "Celia!" she shrieked. A moment later, she heard the patter of footsteps and Celia appeared in the doorway, hair tousled, clutching her bathrobe closed.

"Who—what--,"she stammered, looking from Nancy to Isabel and back again. "I heard you scream—"

"Time you woke up," Nancy said calmly. "Celia, do you know this woman?"

Celia shook her head, eyes wide.

"Please, Isabel," Nancy said. "Tell us who you are and why you're here, and why you have Ethan's manuscript and, if you will, start at the beginning this time."

The intruder gulped, wrinkled her rather freckly nose, and began.

"M'name's Isabel Ficklin. My family use'ta live on the other side of the lake, until a year and a half ago, when my mom packed up my five little brothers and sisters and moved to Terre Haute. I didn't want to go, and I was old enough that she couldn't make me. So I stayed on here.

"I always used to look up at this house when I was little and wonder what it'd be like to live there, so I sort of got in the habit of sneaking in here when everyone was asleep. Through the broken window in the room with all the plants—"

"The conservatory," Celia said coldly.

"The conservat'ry," Isabel amended. "That was how I met him, when he was workin' late in the room with all the books—"

"The study," Celia said, apparently without thinking.

"The study."

"You knew her brother?" Nancy asked.

"I loved him," said Isabel plainly.

Celia made a strangled sound and clutched at the door frame for support. Nancy suddenly realized why the woman's shirt looked so familiar; she had seen it in Ethan Laramie's bedroom, earlier that day.

Tears were pooling in the corners of Isabel's muddy brown eyes. Celia looked murderous. "What do you mean, you loved him?" she demanded, hands on her hips.

Isabel wiped her nose on the back of her hand and choked, "He was—he was the saddest lookin' person I ever saw." She burst into tears, and Nancy handed her a Kleenex from the box on the vanity table.

"Thanks," Isabel murmured damply, blotting at her eyes.

Nancy poked awkwardly at the edges of the rag rug with her toe. This was a development she had not foreseen. Neither, apparently, had Celia, whose fists were clenched tightly.

Finally Isabel crumpled the Kleenex into a wad and said, "He looked up and saw me, that first time, in the mirror."

"The mirror in the hall downstairs?" Nancy asked quickly.

"Yeah," Isabel said. "It was always tilted a little towards the stairs, and he saw me coming down the hall from where he was workin' in the study. I didn' see him, so I went on in there. He wasn' surprised a-tall to see someone sneakin' around after midnight."

"He didn't tell you to leave?" Nancy inquired, incredulous.

"Unh-uh," Isabel said, shaking her head so that the loose strands of hair around her pinched face bobbed back and forth. "Jist smiled, sort of dreamily, and went back to writin'. I looked at the books for awhile, and ev'ry so often he'd glance up at me and shake his head. I use'ta come in every few nights or so and it'd be the same, him writin' like I wasn't there a-tall and me lookin' around."

Nancy decided this was simply too bizarre to be untrue. "Did he ever say anything to you?"

"Ev'ry once in awhile he'd say somethin', sort of to himself. I didn't always understand, but I'd smile a little and nod. He was so serious and—sort of driftin', maybe, like he didn't know what to do."

Celia made an impatient clucking noise, but Nancy silenced her with a look.

Isabel shifted nervously on the blanket chest and continued. "I know it sounds stupid to you, but I loved him and I'd—I'd like to think he felt the same about me. Sometimes though—sometimes I thought that he didn't know I was real."

"Well," said Celia icily, "I think it could hardly mean anything to him if he thought you were a figment of his imagination."

Isabel glowered at Celia, her lips twisted in an unpleasant grimace.

"So," said Nancy quickly, "Celia. Ethan never mentioned this to you?"

"Never," Celia averred. "And I never heard her sneaking around at night. But," she added sheepishly, "I sleep pretty deeply."

"But does this—what Isabel said—sound like how your brother usually was? I mean, does this seem like him?"

"Well," Celia said thoughtfully, "yes. He never seemed to belong entirely to reality, somehow. I can imagine that he'd think _she_ was something he'd made up. Or a ghost. Or something."

"Isabel," said Nancy gently, "When was the last time you saw him?"

Isabel looked up at the young detective, tears slipping from her eyes and trickling silently down her ruddy cheeks.

"Last week," she whispered, drawing the tan shirt tightly around her. "I was with him when he died."


	6. An Echo of Madness

"_You_ killed him?" Celia shrieked, her face livid, her hands shaking uncontrollably.

"Wait!" Nancy commanded, laying a steadying hand on her friend's arm. "She didn't say that, Celie. Go on, Isabel."

"I was comin' down the hall by the stairs, like I usually did," Isabel said slowly, her red-rimmed eyes fixed on the doorway behind Celia, "and I heard somethin' crash, like glass breakin'. I rushed into the front room there and that mirror that always useta tilt toward the stairs, the one he always saw me comin' in, it was broke all over the floor. 'Ethan?' I said, real quiet, and went into the study. He was lyin' on the floor by the desk—"

"You're lying," Celia hissed. "I didn't hear the mirror break that night."

"You also didn't hear me screaming for you when I caught Isabel sneaking around earlier," Nancy pointed out. Celia looked abashed.

"—lyin' on the floor by the desk," Isabel forged on, "and I knelt down to see what'd happened. He was starin' at the ceiling, and his eyes were all glassy. But he knew I was there, because he felt around beside him and grabbed my hand. And then he said somethin' strange—"

"What was it?" Nancy asked curiously.

"He said, 'The sand—the sand.'" Isabel flushed apologetically. "At least, I think. Then he was quiet a second and he started gasping for breath. His face turned sorta grey and I said his name, I think. Then—well, then I knew he was dead, and I lost my mind a little. I musta started running. Next thing I knew, I was standing in the orchard out back, out of breath and crying."

Celia whirled to face Nancy, face disfigured with fury. "Do you _believe_ this, Nancy? This—this _story_ she's made up?" She turned on the cowering girl, her eyes narrowed to angry slits. "You just want attention, don't you? Sneaking around in our house, stealing from us"— she grabbed the front of Ethan's shirt—"and now telling lies about my brother."

"Wait," Nancy commanded. "What part of her story don't you believe?"

Celia faltered a moment, biting her lip and worrying the locket back and forth on its chain. She soon recovered her composure and said, quieter and with more restraint, "Nancy, Ethan was a writer and very creative and very…unusual in some ways, but he wasn't crazy." Celia's eyes shimmered with tears. "You have to believe me."

Nancy guided Celia to the vanity stool and gently nudged her onto the seat. "Celia," she said softly, "Isabel isn't claiming your brother was crazy. You said yourself that you could believe what she said about how they met."

Celia sniffled a little. "But…what she said…about when he died…"

Nancy felt a rush of understanding. Of course Celia would be affronted that Isabel was with Ethan when he died. But Nancy was inclined to believe Isabel's account; the young detective had seen many liars in her short years, and Isabel's face was blank and guileless, her story clear and unadorned. A liar, Nancy thought, would have embroidered the tale and downplayed the less-believable aspects.

She looked down at the sheaf of yellow legal paper in her hands and then back at Isabel, who was rocking back and forth on the blanket chest, knees pulled up under her chin. Celia, arms crossed, was staring at the darkened window. The clock in the hall struck two and its chimes echoed in the emptiness, their desolate, aching sound somehow more mournful than Isabel's smothered sobs.

"Why don't we go to bed," Nancy suggested. "We can discuss this in the morning. Isabel, with your permission of course," she said, nodding toward Celia, "can stay here if she likes."

"Fine," said Celia through clenched teeth, and Isabel unfolded her gawky limbs and hurried into the shadowed hall without another word. When her quick little footsteps had receded into the distance, Celia rose and fixed Nancy with a livid glare.

"Why does she have to stay?" she demanded.

"She has important clues," Nancy replied, meeting her furious gaze. "If we let her leave, she could disappear entirely. And I believe her story, although I can understand your reluctance to—"

"Reluctance?" Celia breathed. "You think this is just _reluctance?_ She broke into our house! And if she didn't kill Ethan, she isn't denying that she was here the night he died!"

"Celia," Nancy sighed, sitting down on the blanket chest, "really, let's go to bed. We can talk it over in the morning."

Celia looked as if she were about to protest, but turned on her heel and flounced out of the room, the tails of her bathrobe flapping. Instead of turning out the light, however, Nancy climbed into bed and pulled up the covers, resting Ethan Laramie's manuscript on her knees, and began to read.

She pulled off the binder clip that bound the pages together. The first sheet was blank except for the words "SELKIRK CURSE" in large, angry capitals. She turned the page and struggled to decipher the spidery, ink-blotched handwriting.

_I have been privileged to discover (he wrote), among the cracked and yellowed pages of Jonas Selkirk's journals, the first known account of the Selkirk Curse. Jonas brought it upon himself, but it is his unfortunate descendants who have borne the consequences of his vanity and monstrous pride. I will, beyond all doubt, become its latest victim. Before that time, however, I will endeavor to bring to light the chain of mistakes and mischance and (here his heavy scrawl was smudged beyond recognition) have plagued Selkirk End._

Nancy turned the sheet over, hoping to read more, but the reverse was blank and a page appeared to be missing. Instead she found a rough sketch of a familiar symbol: an hourglass wreathed in flame, like that on the front of Celia's locket. Beneath he had scribbled "The Birth-mark?"

_Jonas Selkirk emigrated to Illinois from Massachusetts with his wife Elizabeth and their three children in 1851. He built Selkirk End on the shore of Lake Augusta, and quickly became wealthy through shrewd investment in the railroads. His true love, however, was the study of chemistry, then in its nascence. _

Here a paragraph had been scribbled out so thoroughly that he had punched holes in the thin paper with the nib of his pen.

_His journals are filled with triumphant discoveries. Selkirk was particularly fascinated by the medicinal possibilities of certain plants native to the Illinois prairies, and his accounts of his findings are typically self-congratulatory. In February 1857, upon discovering a compound that seemed to be effective in curing his nagging toothache, he wrote, "Imagine! Through my own industry and the analytical power of my own mind, I have triumphed over Nature herself." Selkirk built himself a modest laboratory in the cellar of the house, with the entrance secreted behind a favorite print hanging on the east wall of the study._

A secret passageway! Nancy thought. Perhaps that was how the murderer had gained access to the study! She turned the page, only to discover an entire sheet blanketed in dense, almost undecipherable writing; in places, the words became mere jagged lines.

_The girl the hourglass the sand trickling down. A king of infinite space, time's fell hand the girl the hourglass the sand trickling down. Selkirk and the far-seeing mirror the past and future a single thread. Atropos and the scissors and the thread spun thin. The hourglass. The sand, the sand…_

The sand…it was possible, of course, that Isabel had picked up on this phrase from reading the manuscript, but, believing her account of Ethan's last words, it seemed to Nancy that Ethan had been severely troubled in the months before his death. Shivering, she turned another page.

_Jonas Selkirk was, by all accounts, a handsome man, and he was inordinately vain. In his daughter Hepzibah's papers, I have uncovered evidence that he corresponded with East Coast doctors and researchers who hoped to discover the secret of eternal youth. It would be simple to attribute this to mere vanity, but I believe that there was a far subtler motive behind Selkirk's quest. He had little patience for weakness in others; he is said to have severely beaten his eldest son, Eli, when the boy became the target of the town bully. He despised illness and refused to visit his mother on her deathbed. In 1854 he noted, "Wm. (one of his business associates) is in poor health. Getting past sixty. Quite feeble. Someone ought to put the wretch out of his misery."_

The wind had picked up outside, and bare branches clawed at the window. Nancy leapt, startled. Her eyelids were beginning to droop, and the light in the room seemed hazy and indistinct. She struggled to focus on Laramie's crabbed writing. Then, at the bottom of the page, a paragraph leapt out at her.

_In 1859, Elizabeth, his beloved wife, died suddenly; she had been in perfect health and one day simply collapsed while reading in the study. The doctor could find no explanation for her demise and attributed it to a heart condition…_

Nancy felt as though a fist had closed around her throat.

_Afterward Jonas fell into a decline, refusing to leave the house and spending days on end in his basement laboratory. Hepzibah heard him muttering to himself late at night, and his journals entries are obscure and incomprehensible. Finally, in late 1860, he disappeared entirely. He is believed to have drowned himself in Lake Augusta._

_But I don't believe it._

_Much of Jonas' notes and writings are missing. My mother mentioned once that her sister, a genealogy enthusiast, had taken them with her when she left the family and moved to the East Coast. I have written to her at her last known address, but received no answer. Even without these additional clues, the message is clear: Jonas Selkirk, and his accursed ambition, have doomed us all. _


	7. An Interrupted Breakfast

Much as she hated to put the manuscript aside, Nancy had to admit to herself that it did little good to read while she was so tired. She turned out the light and curled up under the covers, listening to the wind howl outside.

Tomorrow I'll investigate that basement lab, she thought. And call Dad.

The next morning, Nancy crept down to the foyer before the other girls had awakened and dialed a familiar number on the hall table telephone. The glass from the shattered mirror had been swept into a neat pile in the corner, and it glittered like tiny diamonds in the golden morning light.

"Hi Hannah," Nancy said softly. "I can't talk long. How's Dad doing?"

"You can talk to him yourself," the housekeeper replied. Nancy heard her muffled cry of "Carson! It's Nancy!" before she returned to the line. "And how are you doing, dear?"

"Fine," Nancy said. "And Celia is fine, too."

"Here's your dad," Hannah said. "Promise me you're not getting yourself wrapped up in another mystery, Nancy."

"I can't really promise that," Nancy admitted. There was a rustling on the other end of the line.

A rasping voice said, "Hi, Nance."

Nancy felt a lump rise in her throat. "Hi Dad. How are you today?"

"Feeling better," Carson said. "I'm not as stiff and everything seems more—clear, somehow. How are you?"

"I'm good, Dad," Nancy said.

"Oh, listen, Hannah says breakfast is ready."

"I'll call back later," Nancy said, feeling slightly disappointed that she could not hold her father's evasive attention.

"Here's Hannah again," her father said. "Goodbye, Nance."

"Bye, Dad," Nancy choked, but it was Hannah who replied.

"Dear? Don't be upset, he's just a little unfocused th'smorning."

"It's been a month and a half since the accident, though," Nancy protested.

"And the doctors said it could be a year before he's back to normal," Hannah soothed. "Don't worry, dear, just have a nice time in the country. That poor girl needs you. We'll call you later."

"All right," Nancy said, and after saying her good-byes placed the receiver back in its cradle. She sighed deeply, staring at the empty frame that had once held the shattered mirror. It indeed seemed to be tilted toward the stairs, and Nancy could imagine that someone seated at the desk in the study would be able to see an intruder coming down the hall.

"Nancy?"

She looked up to see Celia standing in the doorway, dressed in a blue blouse and cream-colored slacks.

"I made breakfast," she said. "We're in the dining room."

"We?" Nancy said, shaking her head. "Is Isabel up too?"

"Oh, yes," said Celia, an unpleasant note in her voice. "She's quite chipper this morning."

Nancy followed her friend into the dining room. The warm morning light slanted through the cobwebbed windows, creating a sort of haze in the imposing, masculine room. Isabel was seated at the end of the table, in a shaft of golden light, spreading strawberry jam on a piece of toast.

"Hey Nancy," she said, looking up. "You sleep well?"

"Well enough," she replied, sitting down next to the blonde girl. "Did you find a room? I'm sorry we didn't—"

"She slept on the foot of Ethan's bed," said Celia curtly, dropping a plate of toast in front of Nancy with a hollow clunk.

"Oh," Nancy said weakly, watching the sunlight stream through her glass of orange juice. Celia sat down opposite her. There were dark circles under her eyes and her face seemed drawn and tired.

There was silence for a few awkward moments. Finally, Isabel spoke.

"Listen," she said. "I heard you two talkin' yesterday in the study. I know why you're here, Nancy, and I hafta say I agree with Celia. I think somebody killed Ethan, and I want to find out who. If his book can help, then I say we all read it and work on it together."

Celia frowned, but Nancy quickly added, "Actually, Isabel, I read some of it last night." She quickly filled the girls in on what she had read, emphasizing the secret passageway in the study, but omitting the Selkirk family history. Evidently Isabel had read part of the manuscript, because she looked up at Nancy in surprise when she failed to mention the death of Elizabeth Selkirk and her husband's subsequent disappearance. But she said nothing, and it was Celia who responded first.

"There's a passageway in the study? He never told me!"

"I don't know whether he himself explored it or not," Nancy explained. "I haven't read very far. We'll look into it after breakfast."

Nancy felt slightly uncertain about telling the girls everything she knew; she felt Celia was above suspicion, but something about Isabel still made her uneasy. Isabel seemed to have made herself at home at Selkirk End with Ethan's tacit consent. The question, Nancy wondered, was why?

"My mom would love to see this house," Isabel commented through a mouthful of toast. "She loves old houses and the Victorians and stuff. She named all of us kids out of romance novels she's read."

"That would explain it," Celia said in an undertone.

Isabel appeared not to have heard, however, and plowed onward. "My next-youngest brother is Ashley, the sister younger'n him is Guinevere, then Dmitri and Percival and then the littlest is Caravelle."

"Oh," said Nancy politely, her thoughts still lost in Ethan Laramie's manuscript.

"Percival Ficklin?" Celia said snidely. "That's quite a name."

"I like it," Isabel snapped, dropping her fork on her plate with a ringing clang that echoed in the stillness of the dining room.

"Do you?" Celia inquired pointedly. "Is that why you kept sneaking in here? You wanted to pretend you were a princess?"

"I never wanted to be a princess," Isabel said, her voice dangerously calm.

"That's good," Celia hissed, "because you'll never be anything but a filthy ignorant little redneck sl—"

"Enough!" Nancy barked, surprising even herself. "That's enough!" There was a meaningful silence, then Isabel spoke.

"'M sorry, Celia." She bowed her head, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. "I know I'm in the wrong here, but"—she burst into noisy tears—"I loved your brother too, and he was the only person I ever met who I thought understood me."

Celia looked ashamed, her gaze fixed on the gleaming rim of her plate. Nancy waited for her to apologize, but the girl was silent. Beside her, Isabel looked stung.

Suddenly, a pounding sound rattled the dishes and made all three girls jump. "The door!" Celia gasped, eyes wide. The trio ran into the hall, skidding on the rug in their sock feet. Celia reached the door first and threw it open, panting for breath.

On the porch stood a stocky, dark-haired man in his thirties. He was dressed in a conservative black suit and clutched a thick black book to his chest. There was something about him that looked vaguely and hauntingly familiar to Nancy, as if she had seen him in a dream or a past life. He regarded the girls through beady black eyes, a placid smile on his unlined face.

"Sisters," he said, holding out his hands as if in benediction. The biting October wind swirled around him, setting Nancy's teeth on edge. "Sisters, may I come in from the cold?"

Celia had an expression of disdain on her face, but she allowed him inside. He stamped off his glossy dress shoes on the hall rug. He turned to Celia and took one of her thin white hands in his.

"Sister Celia," he said earnestly, looking into her eyes, "how are you faring? I came as soon as I heard of your brother's passing."

"Fine, thank you," Celia said stiffly.

"Won't you introduce me to your friends?" he asked, gesturing broadly with the hand holding the book, which from its gilt-edged pages Nancy surmised to be a Bible.

"This is Nancy Drew and Isabel Ficklin," said Celia through gritted teeth. "Nancy, Isabel, this is Brother Michael of the Anointed Brethren."

The girls murmured their hellos. Nancy noticed that Brother Michael seemed especially taken with Isabel; he stared at her a moment, and an odd, unreadable expression clouded his blue eyes. At last he tore his gaze from the older girl and came to rest on Nancy.

"Drew," he said thoughtfully. "Related to Carson Drew, the criminal lawyer?"

"His daughter," Nancy replied.

"I was sorry to hear of his accident," Brother Michael said quietly. "I have been praying for his recovery."

"Thank you," the young detective murmured. "Tell me, Brother Michael, have you known Celia long?"

"I have spoken to Sister Celia before," the man said vaguely, finally letting go of the girl's hand; Celia surreptitiously wiped it on the front of her slacks. "I did not have the privilege of meeting her brother. He was in town when I called last."

Brother Michael glanced about furtively, as if expecting to be invited into the house. Celia shifted her weight from foot to foot, her lips drawn up tight.

Finally the man spoke, holding the Bible out to Celia. "I wanted to leave this with you," he said, looking earnestly into her eyes. "I hope you may find solace in it. I have taken the liberty of marking a few pertinent passages—"

"Thank you," Celia said stiffly, taking the book and placing it on the hall table next to the telephone. "Is there anything else?"

"No," Brother Michael said, stepping to the door. "I will call again later, when you have had time to pause and reflect. Goodbye, sisters. God bless." He opened the door and was swept away by the brutal gale. Celia slammed the door behind him.


	8. A Dead End

**I don't own any of this, except the characters who crawled out of my own twisted imagination. Thanks for reading!**

"You were pretty rude to him," Isabel said accusingly, arms folded across her chest. Nancy noted for the first time that she was still wearing Ethan's tan shirt.

"He deserves it, always hanging around here," Celia said shortly, flouncing into the study and slumping into one of the wing chairs.

"But he's a _preacher_," Isabel protested, following. "You just threw a preacher out of your house!"

"He's no preacher," Celia said. "He's just nosy. The first time he came, Ethan was in River Heights getting groceries. I tried to turn him away at the door, but he barged in here like he owned the place. It was hours before I escaped. He talked me round and round in circles."

Nancy felt a familiar tingling of suspicion in the tips of her fingers. Could Brother Michael have been involved in Ethan's death?

"While we're here," she said, "why don't we investigate the secret passage Ethan mentioned? He said it was behind a print on the east wall…"

There was only one picture on the east wall. A faded, delicately tinted print in the medieval style, of a rather plump young woman regarding herself in a mirror, tucking a strand of her long, straggly blonde hair behind one ear. Behind her and out of sight, a grotesque skeletal figure hung with tattered and moldering flesh held an hourglass over her head. A man on the girl's right tried in vain to pull Death away, an expression of horror on his face.

"It's hideous," Nancy said.

Celia joined her beside it. "It's called _Death and the Maiden,_" she said. "Ethan said it's actually quite famous, though I can't remember who it's by. I can't stand the thing. It belonged to Jonas," she added, shrugging at the west wall, whence Jonas Selkirk glowered down at them.

"That sounds about right," Nancy murmured, leaning forward to examine the wall and running her fingers along its pockmarked surface. She removed the print from the wall to reveal a small lever recessed behind.

"Here goes," she said, giving it a sharp tug. The three girls leapt backwards as a good-sized portion of the wall swung forward into darkness. Nancy could barely make out the shadowy outline of stone steps leading downward.

"Get a light," Nancy ordered Celia, but to her surprise it was Isabel who rushed off into the hall and returned seconds later with a massive, club-like flashlight. Celia too raised her eyebrows in amazement.

"I lost that ages ago," she said mildly. Nancy expected her to accuse Isabel of stealing it, but Celia too seemed transfixed by the gaping maw in the wall of the study. Cold, stale, murky air drifted from the darkness, carrying with it the dry reek of decay.

"Well, who's going first?" Nancy asked cheerfully.

"You," said Celia, smiling. "You're a detective, you're used to scary things."

"You," Nancy replied. "You lived in this house for nineteen years. You must be even more used to scary things than I am."

"I'll go," said Isabel, stepping forward and turning on the flashlight with a decisive click. She paused at the doorway, turning back with a fiendish grin. "I live in your orchard all summer and your greenhouse all winter, and the things I seen would stop your heart." With that, she started down the stairs, the flashlight casting a bobbing golden halo around her.

Nancy shrugged and followed, with Celia creeping behind. The air felt clammy and close as they descended, and more than once Celia grabbed Nancy's shoulder for balance on the wooden steps.

The stairs were not long, but it was slow going. Finally Nancy heard Isabel give a sharp gasp; they had arrived at the bottom, in a cramped and sepulchral chamber paneled in damp, warped wood. They stood in the hesitant glow of Isabel's flashlight, and the orb of light shivered slightly in her trembling hand.

"Give me that," Nancy said softly. Isabel wordlessly passed her the flashlight and Nancy trained its beam at the wall in front of them. The light reflected from a metallic-tinted, old-fashioned photograph of a handsome young man who looked uncomfortably familiar to Nancy.

"It's Jonas," Celia said suddenly from behind Nancy. "It's like the portrait upstairs, but younger."

And it was, Nancy realized, though she could not shake the feeling that she had seen him somewhere else, perhaps in a dream.

Hanging beside it was another photograph, this one a cameo-shaped portrait of a young woman; she wasn't quite pretty, but she had a cheerful snub nose and an open, smiling face.

"Maybe that's his wife," Nancy said.

"Elizabeth," Isabel murmured, and Nancy felt an inexplicable stab of suspicion that she could not quite put aside. There was so much about Isabel's story that was so unlikely and bizarre; was it really wise to allow her to remain at Selkirk End?

Nancy moved Jonas' portrait aside to reveal another lever, recessed in the wall. She pulled it, but there was only a sickly rasping deep in the bowels of the old house, followed by a shriek of rusted gears grinding on themselves.

"I don't think it's been opened in decades," said Nancy disappointedly. "The mechanism must be rusted. Ethan probably only got this far." Which means, she added silently, that somewhere around here must be…

She was right; behind Elizabeth's portrait she found a tiny keyhole.

"Celia," Nancy asked, "do you still have the key Ethan gave you?" She heard the click of the locket being opened.

"Here," Celia whispered, as if afraid of being overheard in the tiny airless chamber. The key felt cold and oddly heavy in Nancy's hand, and she quickly turned it in the lock, holding the flashlight at eye level. There was a click, and a small door, about the size of a bank lockbox, swung open.

"What's in there?" Isabel hissed into Nancy's left ear. Hesitantly, hoping there were no spiders, Nancy slipped her hand into the hole. Her fingers touched something hard: a small leather case with a gold clasp.

Passing the key back to Celia, Nancy opened the box. Inside, nestled on a bed of crimson velvet, lay an ornate hourglass; but not really an hourglass, she reflected. It was so tiny it could only have measured about three minutes. On the inside lid of the box was the same symbol as was carved on Celia's locket—an hourglass, much like the one in the box, haloed by leaping flames.

"Let's take it upstairs," Nancy said, convinced there was nothing else to find and feeling slightly claustrophobic. The other girls didn't need asking twice; Celia scurried up the stairs with Isabel and Nancy trailing behind. As they stepped into the blinding sunlight of the study, Nancy pushed the secret door shut behind them.

"All right," Nancy murmured, placing the box on the rolltop desk and opening it again. Isabel and Celia leaned over her shoulders; Nancy could feel their hot breath on the sides of her face, making her slightly nervous. She lifted the hourglass from its sumptuous nest. It gleamed in the white-hot morning sun streaming through the east windows. Inside the glass was a white crystalline powder, like salt or sugar but coarser and more reflective; it sparkled at the bottom of the container like the mirror shards in the hall.

Nancy unscrewed the top of the glass and was about to pour the powder into her hand when Isabel gasped, "Stop!"

"What?" Nancy said, but then she noticed too. An acrid, stinging odor rose from the glass, making her slightly light-headed. She quickly replaced the lid and laid the hourglass back in the box.

"It must be one of Jonas' experiments," Isabel said. "We shouldn't touch it 'til we know what it is."

"Thank you," Nancy said, her voice trembling slightly. It had been a close call; she suspected the powder was highly dangerous, and she was ashamed of herself for having done something so thoughtless.

Celia had backed away when Nancy had opened the hourglass. She stood under the windows, arms folded across her chest, biting her lip. "Well, we've seen what there is to see, I guess," she said. "And someone's got to clear up the breakfast dishes. No, I'll do it," she added hastily as Isabel moved to help her. She left the room hurriedly, knocking into the coat rack in the hall as she departed.

Isabel watched her go with a guarded look on her face. "What do you think's in it?" she asked finally.

"No idea," said Nancy, examining the outside of the box. "But the manuscript may tell us. Ethan meant Celia to find it, I'm sure. Did you see anything when you read it?"

"No," Isabel said, sinking into one of the wing chairs and tugging the tan shirt tighter around her. "But then, I'm not as clever as you and Celia."

"Don't say that," Nancy protested. "You just saved my life, maybe, if that powder really is something poisonous."

"Oh," Isabel replied, with a brittle laugh, "sure, I can sew and cook and pick corn and do things like that, but Celia thinks I'm stupid 'cause I don't speak French or play the piano or write books."

Nancy made a noise of dissent, but Isabel was not to be dissuaded. "Don't tell me she don't, either. She thinks I wasn't good enough for her brother." Nancy looked at the floor. "And you, too. You think I'm lyin' about Ethan lettin' me stay in here when he was writin'. You think I'm makin' things up." Her jaw was set firmly, her straggly eyebrows knitted together. "Well, I'm not."

"Isabel," Nancy said, looking up at her, "we're all going through a rough time right now. None of us know who we can trust."

"You're sayin' I'm a suspect," Isabel said flatly.

"Everyone's a suspect," Nancy said.

"Celia's not," Isabel pointed out.

"Celia asked me to solve the mystery," Nancy said, her voice rising. "I suppose it's possible that she could have killed her only, beloved brother, but it seems highly unlikely."

There was an uncomfortable pause in which the only sound came from the clock high on the south wall, its even ticking measuring and dividing the weighted silence.

"So you think I killed him," Isabel said. "Admit it, that's why you want me stayin' here. There's no one else could've done it, if you don't count Celia."

"I didn't say that," Nancy said weakly. "Maybe no one killed him. After all, there wasn't a mark on his body—"

"So he just died, all of a sudden."

"It's a possibility," Nancy admitted.

"Not in this house, it ain't," Isabel said, rising from her seat and striding from the room.


	9. A Troubling Letter

**Again, I don't own Nancy Drew et. al. Or the Shakespearean sonnet that appears in this chapter. I probably don't have to worry about that, since I doubt that Shakespeare would put up with my writing long enough to get to Chapter Nine. And I doubt that he knows (knew?) how to use a mouse.**

Nancy sighed, then rose and climbed the stairs to her bedroom, retrieving the manuscript from her bedside table. From her window, she looked out on the overgrown gardens below.

Seized by the sudden urge to explore, she slipped outside, still holding the manuscript. She found the greenhouse, attached to the rear of the building, with the broken pane Isabel had described. In a dingy corner lay a sleeping bag and a few scattered possessions that could only belong to the blonde girl. Nancy felt a stab of pity for Isabel, who seemed just as adrift as Celia.

Nancy wandered through the garden, imagining it as it must have been in Jonas Selkirk's day, rife with roses and lush with lilies, blossoming and bountiful. Now dead weeds rustled forlornly in the biting October wind under a watercolor grey sky. A few stunted trees had taken root in the flowerbeds, reaching hopelessly toward the weak light. The sun had disappeared behind the clouds, taking with it the last of the morning's warmth.

Beyond the garden, sloping down towards Lake Augusta, was the orchard Isabel had mentioned earlier. The bare and gnarled branches of apple trees coiled above Nancy's head, scraping against each other, rasping angrily in the breeze.

It was oddly appropriate, Nancy thought, as she sat down against the trunk of an apple tree, that the orchard at Selkirk End should be dying. She faintly remembered Celia having once told her that her parents had been organic farmers who had struggled for years to make a living from the tired soil of the old property.

She turned her attention to the manuscript again, turning page after page. Some of it did indeed seem to have a plot of sorts, although it was difficult to follow. Whole pages were devoted to seas of waving, dizzying lines, inked with unsettling precision. Still others bore scribbled inscriptions in Latin and on a dog-eared sheet near the middle of the stack Nancy found a snippet of poetry that she recognized as a Shakespearean sonnet:

When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced 

_The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age;_

_When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed,_

_And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;_

_When I have seen the hungry ocean gain_

_Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,_

_And the firm soil win of the watery main,_

_Increasing store with loss and loss with store;_

_Or state itself confounded to decay;_

_Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,_

_That Time will come and take my love away._

_This thought is as a death, which cannot choose_

_But weep to have that which it fears to lose._

The following page appeared to be a journal entry, though it was undated.

_Midnight, or a few minutes after, and the wind is crying at the windows, pleading to be let in, screaming for sanctuary, but it shall have none. She is here again, running her callused fingers along the spines of my books, her lips moving silently as if in some wordless litany._

_He never comes when she is here._

_I know him to be evil thus she must be an angel._

_She never speaks and I never betray that I am aware of her presence lest she startle and flee into the fury of the night and if she goes I am lost for then he will come. She is skittish and wide-eyed and childlike, and I can feel the serenity of her gaze upon me as she circles the room. I write like a fiend, spiraling words across the page, and she whispers peace into my soul._

_The first time I saw her I thought she was real, thought that she had just wandered in from the dark. But now I know better. There is nothing left that is real, not even Celia, not even me._

Isabel…Nancy thought. But who was "he?" Or was this more evidence of Ethan's madness?

The next page was not, like the others, yellow legal paper. It was a typewritten letter, dated a few months previous. The letterhead at the top read BERINGER PETROCHEMICALS.

Dear Ethan (it read),

I was surprised to hear from you. It's been a long time, and I sometimes wonder whatever happened to you. It seems like another life, back when we were roommates. Remember the time we threw water balloons out the lounge window onto people on the quad? Now look at us—you a famous writer, me with two kids and a mortgage! Thanks for asking about Cheryl and the kids. They're doing great. Melissa just started kindergarten and Greg is learning to walk (which means that he's covered in bumps and bruises right now).

But about the sample you sent. I've never seen anything like it. It's definitely organic, but beyond that I can't tell you much that an English major would understand (ha ha). It's highly toxic, though. I wouldn't send any more through the mail if I were you. And whatever it is, it's subtle. In fact, if you dropped dead from contact with it, I doubt that an autopsy would reveal much. Maybe if you had a really talented coroner.

Seriously, though, Ethan. I hope this is just research for the great American novel. I hate to think that life is so bad out in Hicksville that you've started experimenting with poisons. I mean it. Please stay in touch. Don't wait five years between letters this time.

Bill

Nancy read and reread the letter, brow creased. Ethan must have sent his chemist friend the powder from the hourglass. She reread the letter once, then twice; still holding it in front of her, she rose and hurried back into the house.

Thankfully, the hall was deserted. She flipped through the phone book a few moments before finding the number she needed. A man with a rasping voice answered after three rings.

"Augusta County coroner's office, Dan Finch speaking."

"Hello," Nancy said. "This is Nancy Drew—"

"The detective? Really?" Dan Finch said excitedly. His voice muffled slightly, she heard him yell, "Hey Vida, Nancy Drew is on the phone!" There was a click as another phone was picked up and Nancy heard soft breathing on the extension.

"Vida," Nancy said, smiling wryly, "could you please cover the mouthpiece on your phone? It's a bit hard to hear."

There was an awkward silence followed by another sharp click.

"Well, Miss Drew," said Dan Finch cheerfully. "What can I do for you?"

"I'm looking into the death of Ethan Laramie, Mr. Finch."

"Oh," Dan Finch said, shifting to the morose tone he probably reserved for funerals and inquests. "Oh dear, it's so sad. Such a young man."

"I was wondering," Nancy ventured, "if you thought it was possible that he had been poisoned."

"Wellllpp," he drawled, "usually I can't discuss these things, but since Chief McGinnis thinks so highly of you, and since you've solved so many mysteries, and since you're not a reporter, I guess I could make an exception."

"Thank you, Mr. Finch."

"In a word," Dan Finch went on, "no. I'd say no. No poison."

"Are you sure?" Nancy asked. "It'd be something organic, probably subtle. Maybe something you might have missed, since you weren't looking for it?"

There was a pause.

"Not that I'm suggesting you're not very good at your job—" Nancy added quickly.

"Miss Drew," said Dan Finch, a little more coldly, "when I say he wasn't poisoned, that's what I mean. I'm not incompetent."

"That wasn't what I was—"

"I listed the cause of death as heart failure. He had a heart condition. I seen it before, when I was working up by Hillsdale. A young kid, high school football player, just dropped dead at practice one day. Anything could of brought it on. Overexertion, a nasty shock…anything."

"But you didn't consider poison."

"Well," Dan Finch said awkwardly. "Well, no, not specifically. It wasn't a suspicious death," he finished, a defensive note in his gravelly voice.

"I see," Nancy said. There was another click, and she heard Vida's hesitant breath on the other end of the line. "That'll be all then, Mr. Finch. Thank you for your time." Dan Finch hung up the phone first, but Vida was a bit slower on the draw. Through her extension, Nancy distinctly heard Finch snap, "That spoiled little witch!"

Sighing, Nancy hung up the phone. She had been short with the coroner, but the discovery of the letter in Ethan's papers had rattled her. She wasn't sure whether to trust Dan Finch's judgment or not; rumors of his incompetence had been the stuff of River Heights gossip for years. Could Ethan have indeed been poisoned? But by whom and why?

But a new suspicion was beginning to form in Nancy's mind. Had Ethan asked Celia to read the manuscript as a sort of suicide note? Could he have been desperate enough to take his own life?


	10. A Confession

"Nancy?"

The young detective glanced up to see Celia standing hesitantly in the doorway. "Who was on the phone?"

"Dad," Nancy lied, shuffling the papers in her lap.

"How is he?"

"Good," she replied. "What're you up to?"

"Reading," Celia said idly, running the back of her thumb along the door trim. "What was Isabel so upset about earlier?" she asked, trying and failing to sound nonchalant.

"She's taking Ethan's death hard," Nancy said slowly. "Celia, I want you to see something." She pulled out the sheet of paper with Ethan's description of Isabel and silently handed it over. Celia read it, her hand shaking, then looked up at Nancy.

"I don't…I don't…"

"I know it's hard for you to accept Isabel," Nancy said, laying a hand on Celia's arm. "Believe me, I understand. But it sounds like she made the last months of your brother's life a lot easier, whether she knew it or not."

Celia was silent a moment, than slid down the wall to sit on the floor, knees tucked up under her chin. Nancy sat beside her, still holding the manuscript.

"I miss him," Celia said.

"I know," Nancy replied, watching the sun slant through the glass panes in the front door.

"I mean"—Celia choked a little, then regained her composure—"even when he was a little…preoccupied, he was always here. I never had to worry about where our next meal was coming from or whether the house would fall in around us, because Ethan took care of all that. When I was in school and the other girls would make fun of me—remember?—I'd cry by myself in the bathroom and hide at recess, but I really didn't care because I knew I could go home and it'd just be Ethan and me. We never had to hide who we really were. I know you don't understand, but…"

"No," said Nancy quickly. "I understand, Celia. More than you think."

But Celia appeared barely to have heard. "…in town, people stared at us all the time. 'There go those Laramie kids, their parents were crazy and then they drowned.' People used to gossip and say horrible things about us, that Ethan had killed our parents or that my mom's family was full of lunatics. But here we were just—us. We did silly things, we had this bizarre set of in-jokes that no one else could have ever understood. He always took care of me. He was all I had."

Nancy felt persistent tears pricking at her eyelids. "Celia, listen. A few months ago, when my dad…Hannah came and got me and drove me to the hospital, told me that there'd been an accident, that he'd been thrown from the car and no one knew what he'd be like when—if—he woke up. Whether he'd know who we were or he was. But none of it meant anything until I saw him lying there."

"Nancy," Celia began, but Nancy went on.

"He looked so weak and frail and grey and even when he woke up, he seemed dazed and unfocused. He seemed completely helpless, and he'd always been funny and strong. When he was around, people just felt—better, somehow. He'd always been the one to bail me out of trouble. There was nothing he couldn't fix. And I couldn't fix him."

A single, hot tear trickled down Nancy's cheek. "So I guess I realized the hard way that the people who love you can't always protect you. Sometimes you just have to be strong for yourself."

Celia gave a strangled cry and buried her face in Nancy's shoulder. The two girls sat in silence for a time, Celia sobbing onto Nancy's shirt sleeve, Nancy staring into the blinding noon sunlight as silent tears slid down her face.

Finally Celia spoke, her voice ragged with tears.

"We had an argument the night he died."

Nancy said nothing.

"I mean, we bickered a lot. We were brother and sister, after all, but this was different. This was the first time we'd really fought about anything," Celia went on.

Had Isabel heard Celia and Ethan fighting that night? Nancy wondered, but merely whispered, "What did you fight about?"

Celia wiped her nose with the back of her hand and leaned back against the wall, eyes fixed on the ceiling. The golden fall sunlight illuminated the tears caught in her long eyelashes and gently lit the damp streaks on her face.

"He wanted me to apply for college," she said. "He'd sent off for all these brochures for me to look at. I told him I wasn't going to go. I said that if it was the money he was worried about, wasn't it better for me to get a job instead of spending so much on school?"

She wrapped the slender silver chain of her locket around her fingers as she spoke and tapped the fingers of the other hand on the hardwood floor in a nervous staccato. "He said the money didn't matter, that we'd find a way. I told him I wasn't leaving Selkirk End. I tore up the brochures and threw them in the fireplace. Then—"

"Then what?" Nancy asked gently. "Was it you who broke the mirror?"

"No!" Celia said, glancing at her in surprise. "No! I don't know what happened to the mirror. I didn't lie to you, Nancy. I just didn't tell you quite everything."

"I didn't mean that," Nancy apologized. "Please, go on."

"Then," Celia said slowly, bowing her head so that a curtain of dark hair concealed her face, "then he said something that—I mean, you have to understand, he never said anything bitter about what he'd had to give up for me. He wasn't like that."

"What did he say?" Nancy prompted, though she thought she already knew.

"He stood up and faced the window for a minute. It was just getting dark, and it was that time of evening when the shadows are just starting to fall, so softly that you barely notice. He turned to face me, and he looked almost savage, Nancy. Then he said, very quietly, 'Celia, if you knew what I've sacrificed for you...I've buried myself alive so that you could have some semblance of a normal childhood. I've watched every dream I ever had suffocate and die in this town, in this house…and you'd throw all that away?'

"His face was twisted, almost unrecognizable…I started to back toward the door, but he yelled after me: 'I secluded you here, God knows why, and now—now you're standing there telling me that I've martyred myself for nothing, that you're too afraid to leave this house, too afraid to do what I'd give anything—anything to do.'"

She paused a moment, and there was no sound but the even ticking of the clock in the study across the hall.

"'Then why don't you leave?" I yelled back. 'You go to school, then. I'll stay here. I'm not stopping you.'

"'You don't understand, do you?' he spat, sitting down in the desk chair and facing me. 'You really don't understand at all. Night after night after night, sitting here waiting for him. It's only a matter of time, Celia.' And that's when he asked to see my locket. I was lying, before, Nancy…I wouldn't give it to him. He wasn't in his right mind. I thought he'd destroy it. So he walked over to me and yanked it from my neck. I started sobbing and threw myself against the wall and huddled there, covering my eyes with my hands. I didn't see what he did with the locket—hid the key in it, I suppose—and then I heard it hit the floor at my feet. I stooped to pick it up, not looking at him, and I heard him say, "And when he comes, Celia, I want you to do something for me.'"

"Read the manuscript," Nancy murmured, glancing over at the place where it sat, in a beam of sunlight from the front door.

"I didn't tell you because I thought he had lost his mind and I didn't want you to think badly of him. And because I was ashamed. Because he was right. I'm a coward, Nancy, and now he's dead and I'm alone. You're so lucky…you can't imagine what it's like to be like me. You're so confident and brave. I can't be strong for myself. I've never had to. And now—now I haven't got anyone to depend on…"

There was a rustling in the hall, and Nancy looked up to see Isabel standing by the study door. Wordlessly, she sank to the floor in front of the two girls and took Celia's thin white fingers in her own square, weathered hands.

"You've got me," she said simply, and Celia looked up at her through a veil of tears, surprise written on her blotchy face. Nancy held her breath, waiting, as the girls sat motionless, a tableau of grief. Finally, Celia spoke.

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

"No," Isabel insisted, biting her chapped lower lip. Her face was curtained by her dishwater-blonde hair, and Nancy couldn't read her expression, but her voice cracked slightly as she went on.

"No, Celia, I'm sorry for intrudin' on you like this, and I'm sorry for yellin' at you all earlier. But it doesn't do any good for us to go on fightin'. Ethan woulda hated that."

Celia made a sound somewhere between a sniffle and a laugh and tilted her head back, the sunlight casting flecks of garnet in her chestnut hair. "Oh, would he ever. When we'd argue about things—stupid things, looking back—he'd lock himself in the study and sulk for hours."

Isabel let go of Celia's hands and scooted back against the wall next to Nancy. "I imagine," she said. "He sure liked his peace and quiet. I think if I'da come in every night and made a bunch of noise he'd've thought twice about letting me stick around."

"Once," said Celia, an impish smile blooming across her thin face, "biking home from town, he rode four miles out of his way to avoid having to talk to our neighbor Mr. Baker, who was walking down the road in front of his house."

"Oooh, I would too," Isabel said, grinning. "One time that cranky old man cornered me at church and talked about homemade mole repellants for forty-five minutes. I don't blame Ethan at all."

The clock beside them struck noon, and all three girls jumped. "Lunchtime, I think," Celia said, awkwardly stumbling to her feet. "Ooof. Sat there too long. My knees are stiff. You coming, Nancy?" she added as Isabel stood.

Nancy rubbed her swollen eyes, brushing aside the sun-warmed, sticky tears still lingering on her cheeks. "No thanks, Celia," she said, her voice ragged. "I'm not that hungry. You two go on."

They hesitated a moment, then disappeared down the hall. Stiffly, Nancy reached for Ethan's manuscript and slowly walked down the hall toward the grand curving stairway, passing the glittering debris of the mirror and the open study door.

Suddenly, a curious notion skimmed across the surface of her mind. Stopping at the foot of the stairs, she turned back to face the hallway and the front door at the far end. Someone coming from the back of the house, as Isabel so often did, could easily have been seen in the tilted mirror by someone in the study.

I knew that, she reminded herself. But there was something else, something that she felt she should understand, but whatever it was had flitted away into the recesses of her brain, leaving only spreading ripples behind.

Sighing, she climbed the stairs to her bedroom, where she threw herself onto the bed (the broken-down old mattress emitted a shriek of protest) and began to read.


	11. A Sign From Beyond

The next few pages were covered in clumsy sketches--doodles, really--of the furniture in the study. Occasional words and phrases were sprinkled among them, some of them recognizable as fragments of poetry, others utterly incomprehensible to Nancy.

At last she uncovered another yellow sheet of Ethan's furious, ink-blotched handwriting.

_It's a funny thing _(Ethan Laramie had written, in the dark months before his death)_. A funny thing, that Jonas Selkirk, who fought so desperately and so senselessly against Time itself, seems to have won his battle._

_I say this not merely because his body was never found, but because he is still here._

_You're crazy, Laramie._

_But it's true. I've seen him—not his face, and not for long, but I've caught fleeting black glimpses of him in the mirror and from the corners of my eyes. Late at night, in the unholy hours between midnight and morning. It's the same mirror she comes from, but she comes to save me and he comes to collect his due._

_It's unfair. He's the one, a hundred-and-however-many years ago, who sold his soul for eternal youth and yet we're the ones who must pay the price. He came for all my ancestors (greedily seizing both my parents at once) and now he haunts the halls of this moldering wreck of a house, waiting. Waiting for me._

_I'm not sure that I believe in the devil but I believe in him because I have seen him, many times. He is patient for now but for how long? Time is his enemy, and Patience and Time are near kin._

_I will know when my time has come because I will glance up from my work to see his face in the mirror. He will be smiling, like Death. My only hope is to discover why he was driven to pursue immortality, and how his ghastly work can be undone._

Nancy shivered and turned the page. Paper-clipped to the next sheet were two photographs, identical to those she had seen in the secret passage earlier. Elizabeth Selkirk, whose round face and cheerful expression belied the tragedy that awaited. Jonas Selkirk, younger than his portrait in the study but still—

And Nancy knew. Her hands shook as she stared into Selkirk's dark eyes, and a weighty dread settled itself around her shoulders. It's just a coincidence, she told herself, but every instinct was telling her that it was true.

It all made sense; the facts arranged themselves neatly in her mind, like pieces of a puzzle. Ethan, waiting. Jonas, waiting. The legend of the Selkirk treasure. What was it Celia had said at lunch yesterday? It seemed so many years ago, now. Her mother's family. The curse. And Isabel. Perhaps Isabel, too…

From downstairs, she could hear a dull, muffled thudding. Someone was knocking at the door. "Coming!" she heard Celia call. A sudden, frigid horror spread through Nancy. She could think of no one who would be at the door, except—

Leaping to her feet, she skidded across the room and down the hall, hugging the pages of Ethan's manuscript to her chest. She hurried down the stairs, the threadbare carpet deadening the sound of her pounding footsteps.

At the end of the hallway, as if drawn to the house by some dark instinct, loomed Brother Michael of the Anointed Brethren. Celia stood before him, her back to Nancy, and every line in her angular body indicated disgust. Isabel was standing by the study door, holding a paper plate with a peanut butter sandwich on it.

"Sisters," he said, indicating them all with a sweep of his hand. Even from the foot of the stairs, Nancy sensed the cold vacuum of his dark eyes. The foot of the stairs, she thought, her mind racing. Crossing from the back hall to the entryway. And the mirror.

"Why are you back?" Celia demanded, voice quivering.

"He's back because he felt it calling to him," Nancy said hoarsely, her voice sounding unfamiliar as it echoed in the arched hall.

Celia jumped, looking back over her shoulder to see Nancy for the first time. "What do you mean?" she asked, glancing from Brother Michael to the young detective with confusion written on her furrowed brow. The man stood unblinking, regarding Nancy with disdain.

"I mean," Nancy said, "that you couldn't resist coming back here. This house—Selkirk End—it calls to you, doesn't it? I'm sure Celia would agree." She took a few tentative, sleepwalking steps down the hallway. She was suddenly and preternaturally aware of each gasping breath she took, of each hesitant pulse of her heart. She hardly knew what she was saying, only that it was vital that she say it. The pages of the manuscript in her hands rustled nervously in a breeze that only she could feel.

"I don't know what you mean, Sister Nancy," he said smoothly. "I am here to see Sister Celia and offer her what comfort I can."

"Sister," Nancy continued thoughtfully. "Not sister, but cousin perhaps. She said she had an aunt who moved away before she was born. Are you her aunt's son?"

"Sister Nancy—"

"I think you are," Nancy said evenly. "The resemblance is uncanny, did you know that? Did your mother tell you?"

"Tell me what?" he said, his smoothly handsome face devoid of expression.

"How much you look like your ancestor Jonas Selkirk. I'm sure she was quite proud of it. I'm guessing your mother didn't just move away. Was she disinherited?"

Celia looked bewildered, but Isabel's mouth hung slightly open, as if she were about to speak. There was a look of dawning comprehension in her eyes.

"All right," Brother Michael said slowly, tilting his head to one side. "I don't know what you're getting at, but I think you'd better stop while you're ahead, missy."

"I saw you that night," Isabel said suddenly.

"Saw me where? When?" the man demanded, turning on Isabel. "What are you talking about?"

"In the hallway," Isabel murmured softly. "Right after I heard the mirror break. I saw something move in the dark, by the front door, but I thought it was a trick of the light. You musta doubled back through the hall and out the broken winda in the conservatory when I was—when I was in the study with Ethan."

"Are you saying that I killed him?" he spat. "Because that's ridiculous. He died of a heart condition. It said so in the papers."

"No," Nancy said. Brother Michael stared at her with contempt. "No," she repeated, her voice level and even. "You didn't murder him. You're not guilty of anything except breaking and entering.

"You were looking for the treasure. Your mother told you about it, am I right? She inherited all of Jonas' Selkirk's papers, except his journal. Ethan found that in the library. He wrote to her, wanting to borrow the rest of Jonas' notes, but I'm guessing she's dead. Please nod or something, Brother Michael, to let me know if I'm on the right track."

The man laughed, a wheezing, mirthless sound that echoed eerily in the dim-lit room. The sun had disappeared behind the heavy October clouds again, and weak grey light filtered exhaustedly through the grimy window on the front door.

"Good guesses, Sister Nancy," he said mockingly. "Yes, my mother is dead. To her last breath she cursed her father for sending her away. He was a feeble old man, and she'd looked after him devotedly. Given up the best years of her life for him. Listened to him complain and moan and predict his death every day for more than a decade. But he didn't have the decency to actually die. She said he just lived on and on and on."

Brother Michael grinned. "But you're wrong about one thing. I don't care about the treasure. There is no treasure, Sister Nancy, not in the way that you'd understand it."

"The house," Celia murmured, eyes wide. "You wanted—"

"My mother," he said, a steely note in his voice for the first time, "my mother served her dad—your grandfather--devotedly. The only joy she had was going to town on Saturdays to do the shopping. That, and researching their ancestors late at night in the study. The rest of the time he kept her running back and forth, helping him to the bathroom and cooking him oatmeal. He wouldn't even let her go to church on Sundays. Meanwhile, her sister—your mother—was off at college. Then she got married and ran off west, leaving my mother to wipe up the old man's drool."

"So you wanted revenge," Isabel said fiercely. "But Ethan didn't have anything to do with it. He never even woulda met his grandfather."

A change had come over Brother Michael; his cold beady eyes now glowed with anger, as if some long-smoldering rage deep inside him had burst finally into flame. "She served him like a slave! And what was her reward? When he found out I was going to be born, he threw her out of the house, the sanctimonious old—"

"And her sister came back," Nancy finished, "when she heard that her father was dying alone. He changed his will in favor of Celia's mother, who had brought along her husband and her son. To his other daughter he left nothing. That didn't sit well with your mother, did it?"

The man said nothing, but his whole being seemed to simmer with fury.

"So you came out here when she died. Just to see it. The house. The land. The inheritance she had been cheated out of years before. You hung around, met Celia in the guise of a door-to-door evangelist. Then you discovered the broken window in the conservatory and couldn't resist. This old house got quite a lot of traffic by night, apparently. How lucky for you that Ethan Laramie mistook your midnight rambles for evidence of his own madness."

"I didn't kill him," Brother Michael spat. "I didn't even know he was dead until I saw it in the paper."

"True," Nancy replied, not taking her eyes from the man's face. Her words came to her as a surprise, as if she were speaking for someone else. "You didn't murder him. But you killed him all the same."

There was no response from Brother Michael, but Celia clapped a hand over her mouth, half-smothering a cry. Isabel, her sandwich lying uneaten on the hall table, shifted her weight from foot to foot.

"He would have heard a noise in the hall," Nancy went on dreamily. In her mind she could see him, sitting at the desk facing the study doorway, bent over his notebook, scribbling furiously. "He looked up at the mirror, expecting to see Isabel."

"But it wasn't me," Isabel whispered, her huge brown eyes staring into nothingness as if she, like Nancy, was reviewing the scene in her mind. "It was you."

"But he didn't see _you_," Nancy said. "He saw Jonas Selkirk. It was the sign he was waiting for. The sign he was dreading. He picked up the paperweight from the desk and threw it. It shattered the mirror. You turned, saw Isabel, and ran." She paused for breath, but the force that was guiding her compelled her to go on. "Ethan Laramie saw his own death reflected in the mirror. And the shock was enough to kill him. A genetic heart defect—runs in your family, did you know that, Brother Michael?"

He was staring blankly at her, as if her words meant nothing to him. "It should have been ours," he said, the corners of his mouth drawn up tight. "That's what she always used to say. Before she'd tuck me in at night, she'd describe it like it was a fairy-tale world. The rose garden. The orchard. The lake. And the house, like something from a dream. 'Someday I'll show you,' she said. She used to get out the photos and the letters. Jonas' letters, the stuff she'd taken with her when she left. And when she died and I got the letter…it was a sign."

"A sign from God?" Celia demanded, her hand clenched around her locket, her voice shaking.

"Better," Brother Michael said, and the wan light from the window seemed to halo him for a moment. "A sign from Jonas. A summons to return and claim my birthright."

They stood silently a moment. Slowly, Nancy felt the glow of anger and discovery leave her. Freed from her trance, she was suddenly exhausted, and a weary resignation washed over her. "I'm calling Chief McGinnis," she said, lifting the phone and studying the rotary dial.

"I can't let you do that," his voice hissed, his stale breath hot at her ear.


	12. An Ending and a Beginning

**I now interrupt this cliffhanger for a word from the author. No, I don't own Nancy Drew and company, and again, I don't own the lyrics to "Time in A Bottle." In case you wondered. Thanks for reading, and be sure to review—your input is appreciated!**

Frozen, the telephone receiver dangling in her hand, she stared at the amateurish watercolor roses hanging over the hall table. Wasn't there a song—"The Last Rose of Summer"? Something like that?

Resolutely she turned to face him. Another criminal. There had been so many over the years, most of them cartoonishly sinister and laughably hapless. She had long since ceased to fear them, her apprehension replaced by the adrenaline-fueled thrill of capture and triumph.

This was different, somehow. It was as if a haze had fallen over her, as if she were lost in a heavy fog, feeling gingerly for her way. So many criminals. So many times she had heard the door of a River Heights police car slam shut, and so many times she had stood unflinching under their vitriolic gaze as they were driven off to judgment.

"Drop the phone, Sister Nancy," he whispered, and she felt his cold hand at the small of her back, guiding her away. She did as she was told, and the receiver hit the table with a dull thud.

"Good girl," he breathed, his hands on her shoulders. "Now the three of you are going to sit tight here until I'm gone, you understand?"

Nancy stared blankly at the gaping empty frame of the mirror hanging on the wall. Behind her, she saw Celia and Isabel exchange glances. Brother Michael smiled, but the smile did not touch his fathomless dark eyes.

"God bless you, children." He turned toward the door, his hand on the knob. Why am I letting him go? Nancy wondered. What has happened to me? For a moment, she saw a glimpse of her father standing before her; her father as he had once been, before the accident.

And then two forms rushed past her, leaving her standing forlorn in the hallway. Shrieking, Celia seized the man's right hand and clawed at the shoulders of his black suit. With a cry of surprise, he turned in time to see Isabel, wielding the brass elephant Ethan had used to break the mirror, strike him on the forehead. He staggered a moment, then slid down the length of the door, clutching his brow. Blood seeped from between his fingers as he crumpled senseless to the floor.

"Well, that's that," Isabel said calmly. "Should we call the police now?"

Celia was staring at the man's prone form, her face white.

Nancy stumbled blindly to the phone. The receiver, lying on its side on the table, purred gently. Hands shaking, she dialed the familiar number.

"Chief McGinnis? This is Nancy Drew."

**A Week Later**

"So," Celia said, rummaging through the box of records, "what do you think? Jim Croce or The Bee Gees?"

"No Bee Gees," Isabel moaned. She was draped over the chaise longue in the study, her left hand over her eyes.

"Jim it is, then," Celia said, blowing the dust from the record's surface and gently placing it on the turntable. As the music began, she turned to smile at Nancy. "Well, your last night here. Anything special you want to do?"

"Nope," Nancy said. She was sitting in the desk chair, absently turning the pages of Ethan's manuscript. The tiny hourglass-vial sat on the blotter in front of her. She picked it up, letting the white powder sift from side to side. Strange, she thought; I was so sure for a while that Ethan had been poisoned. I was caught up in the story, Jonas' story, just as Ethan was. Just as Brother Michael was. In a way Jonas did win. He did defeat death, though not by medicine or magic. He's still got a hold on us all.

Brother Michael—Michael Selkirk—was awaiting trial in the Augusta County Jail. If convicted, Nancy doubted he would get more than a few weekends behind bars and perhaps a year or two of probation. Breaking and entering was not a serious charge, and Nancy was certain he would soon be free to harass Celia again.

Luckily, she thought, Celia wouldn't be around to harass.

"Have you two finalized your plans yet?" Nancy asked.

"Almost," Celia said. She looked calm, almost at peace, for the first time since Ethan's death. The two girls' attack on Michael Selkirk appeared to have done them much good. Isabel had even allowed Celia to put Ethan's tan shirt in the laundry—although she had put it on again immediately when it was dry.

"I can't wait to see Europe," Isabel said dreamily from the chaise longue. "We're so lucky. When I called my mom to tell her, she couldn't believe it. Kept saying 'You makin' this up, girl?'"

It was lucky, Nancy thought, that Mrs. Hartford, the rich lady whom Celia had stayed with in River Heights, had decided she needed a companion on her winter tour of Europe. It was even luckier that Celia was available, and almost unbelievably lucky that Mrs. Hartford, after hearing Isabel's story, wanted to take her along as well. Ethan's looking out for them, Nancy thought, then immediately dismissed the notion as ridiculous and sentimental.

"Mrs. Hartford doesn't have any children, and she didn't want to go alone," Celia said. "She'll need us to look after her. It won't be entirely a pleasure trip."

"Are you crazy?" Isabel yelped, sitting upright. "That lady's not even sixty yet and she's got more energy than us! She'll be draggin' us around!"

Celia looked abashed, but soon recovered. "I mean that she's taking us out of pity," she said determinedly. "We can't be causing trouble for her."

Nancy lowered her gaze to the manuscript to hide her smile. Over the past week, Isabel and Celia had turned from suspicious adversaries to teasing friends. She was almost jealous of the adventure lying before them.

Celia sighed a little. "This is what me and Ethan always talked about doing. Traveling. We were poor, though, and we couldn't leave the house shut up…"

"Don't worry about the house," Nancy said. "I'll look in on it while you're gone, and the sheriff said he'd have someone drive by every night. And now that we've fixed that conservatory window, you won't have animals getting in." She cast a playful look at Isabel, who merely laughed.

"Thanks, Nancy, for everything," Isabel said. "We couldn't—well, I guess we wouldn't—have done it without you. We wouldn't even have met. We'd still be crying by ourselves."

Pausing, Isabel smiled wistfully, and for a moment Nancy caught a glimpse of the angel Ethan Laramie had referred to in the manuscript.

"Ethan," Isabel said. They fell silent, and for a moment the only sound was Jim Croce's voice and the hissing pop of static on the record player.

"I was angry," Celia said quietly. "It seemed so unfair. But now—now it hurts, but it's different. It feels like a part of me's been carved away but it's scabbing over. It'll never entirely heal, but I think I can go on." She laughed hollowly, sliding her locket back and forth on its silver chain. "That sounds stupid, doesn't it?"

No one answered her. Nancy carefully placed the manuscript back on the desk and lowered the rolltop. Soon, although she couldn't have known, she would be embroiled in _The Crystal Palace Intrigue._

"I've been thinking about what you said, Nancy," Celia went on, glancing nervously at the young detective. "About the people you love not being able to protect you. About having to be strong for yourself. You're right. I've got to learn that. But," she added, examining the backs of her hands with studied deliberation. "you can't survive on your own. You can't just push everyone away."

Nancy didn't answer. She looked over the top of the desk into the hall beyond. The empty mirror frame had been removed, and a photograph of Ethan and Celia in happier days hung opposite the study door.

"Oh, I just love this song," Isabel said quietly.

_If I could save time in a bottle_

_The first thing that I'd like to do_

_Is to save every day_

_'til eternity passes away_

_Just to spend them with you…_

"Excuse me," Nancy said suddenly, and brushed past the two girls into the hall. Frosty moonlight streamed through the front door, and the October wind dashed at the windows. She hesitated a moment, her hand resting on the receiver, before dialing the number.

_But there never seems to be enough time _

_To do the things you want to do_

_Once you find them._

_I've looked around enough to know_

_You're the one I want to go_

_Through time with._

It rang twice before she heard a click and his gravelly voice rasp, "Hello?"

"Dad?" Nancy said, tears welling in her eyes. "I just wanted you to know how much I love you."

The End


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